An
auger is a device for moving material or liquid by means of a rotating helical
flighting. The material is moved along the axis of rotation. A drill bit uses
this mechanism to remove shavings from a hole being drilled. For some uses the
helical flighting is enclosed in a tube, for other uses the flighting is not
encased.
An Archimedes screw is essentially an auger that lifts water
from a lake or river.
Snowblowers use an auger to move snow towards an
impeller where it is thrown into the discharge chute. Combines use both enclosed
and non enclosed augers to move the unthreshed crop into the threshing mechanism
and to move the grain into and out of the machine's hopper. A Zamboni uses an
auger to remove loose ice particles from the surface of the ice.
Plumbers
use a plumber's snake, a flexible auger, to remove obstructions from
pipes.
Agriculture
|
Albrecht Dürer's pen-and-ink drawing of a man using an auger, ca 1496 (Musée Bonnat, Bayonne,
France) |
The grain auger is used in agriculture to move grain from trucks and
grain carts into grain storage bins. A grain auger may be powered by an electric
motor, a tractor through the power take-off, or sometimes an internal combustion
engine mounted on the auger. The helical flighting rotates inside a long metal
tube moving the grain upwards. On the lower end, a hopper receives grain from
the truck or grain cart. A chute on the upper end guides the grain into the
destination location.
Solid state physics
Auger
(pronounced oh-jhay) recombination is a process for electron-hole pair
recombination in semiconductor crystals. This process dissipates energy in the
form of heat rather than by photon emmission. Two electrons in the conduction
band collide with one of them losing energy and falling to the valence band and
combining with a hole. The energy transferred to the second electron is
gradually lost in a series of small steps, dissipating thermal energy to the
crystal lattice